


Daddy Issues

by pkfb269



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Daughter!Reader - Freeform, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:40:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25493248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pkfb269/pseuds/pkfb269
Summary: The protagonist of the story is Phoenix Sheppard. She finds out her father is Mark Sheppard so she decides to meet him and ends up becoming immersed in his acting life.There will be romantic relationships emerging in this, I haven’t tagged them yet because spoilers!
Kudos: 1





	Daddy Issues

“Phoenix, it’s ok, we can suspend your studies for now and see how you’re doing in a year. It isn’t as uncommon as you think and nobody will think any less of you for this.” She was perched on the end of her chair with her hands on her diary resting in her lap and looking at me with that empathic look on her face; eyebrows slightly raised, mouth in a soft, neutral position.

“I know, it’s just that it’s been such a struggle to get this far and I don’t want to just stop and have it all be for nothing.” The words caught in my throat as tears welled up in my eyes. This was the third time I’d entered into a further education course. I’d given up at college level the last two times, now having useless certificates in computer studies and applied sciences. My family were not supportive of me at all, they were just waiting for me to fail and if I came home saying I’m taking a year out, well, they'd be so glad to give me the “told you so” crap.

“It won’t be for nothing; this is more of a pause than a stop. I’ve spoken with your tutor and you are a hard working student who produces some great quality essays. She is certain you’ll have no trouble picking up your studies after some time out.”

I slumped back against the purple fabric of the chair. I already knew my decision. It's just that I was struggling to form the words and I was using these last minute arguments to put it off. Don’t get me wrong, when I say arguments, I don’t mean that the university was forcing me to take a break to sort my personal shit out, I came to them with a problem and they laid out all the options for me. I was the one who kept coming back to taking a break. I was the one who had the idea on my mind night and day. I was the one who kept bringing it up and then finding any reason why it wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, I had just run out of those reasons.

“Ok. Let’s do it.” The very second the words were out of my mouth, I felt like a weight had been lifted and a tear slipped down my cheek. 

The university counsellor guided me through the paperwork and assured me that I was still technically a student and so I could come back and see her anytime. As we were wrapping things up, she changed the subject to the reason for my break. 

“Have you had any more thoughts about your father and what you want to do going forward?

“Yeah, I want to meet him.” 

__________

I don’t know if you can tell, but I hate my family. At ‘home’ it’s just me and my mother, but my grandparents, my mother's parents, live just a couple of streets away and they love to stick their neck in and have their say. 

My mother is crazy, like full on bats in the belfry, round the twist crazy. I have no idea how she is not locked up somewhere or how she convinces people that she’s a perfectly functioning human being. 

My grandparents cater to her every demand and coddle her through every tantrum of course, I mean she did have such a difficult childhood, what with ‘the sickness’ and all. 

I’d tried to get away from them a few times and I had actually succeeded for a while. I moved into my own place and held down a steady job, but it was just never enough for me. I just felt like I needed more of a challenge and that I could be so much more than a dead end job in a supermarket.

The decision to try college again was not easy. I already knew what my family would say. After the predicted screaming matches, mother let me move back in and give up my full time job. I started college to get some qualifications in the right area and it only took a couple of weeks to find a part time job where I could work evenings and keep up some form of income. My grandparents went absolutely ballistic when they found out. They absolutely despised my very existence, and for once this wasn’t my fault. 

My mother was 18 when she got pregnant with me and 19 when she had me. Due to her ridiculously overprotective and sheltered upbringing, she went through her rebellious teenage years quite late. She got into punk rock, which I can actually respect her for, she was mad about the Sex Pistols and she’d sneak out of the house at night to go with her friends to indulge in the London punk scene of the early eighties. Well, one night she met someone, stayed out all night and drove my grandparents crazy, then came home pregnant. 

She never said who the guy was, probably because my grandad was constantly threatening to smash both his kneecaps if he ever found out. 

Ok, so the story isn’t too crazy right now, but here’s where the plot turns from late rebel to ‘what the fuck Pamela are you insane?”. Despite never naming the guy,  _ she gave me his damn surname _ . Pamela Appleton named her illegitimate daughter Phoenix Nancy Sheppard. 

So first off, my grandparents nearly bust an artery over the pregnancy, but nine months later when they heard the name? I’m glad I was a baby and didn’t have the mental capacity to understand or remember how that conversation went. 

The rejection actually came in two parts; they would never call me Phoenix, or even Fee, which is what mother and best friend call me. They chose to call me by my middle name as it was “the only respectable thing about that child.” Mother did protest some of the time, but never with any actual heart, she gave me the name after Nancy Spungen, Sex Pistols star Sid Vicious’ girlfriend.

The second part of the rejection came later when my uncle Gary died. I was 14 years old when he died of a heroin overdose and I distinctly recall my grandmother telling my mother not to bring me to the funeral as I “wasn’t one of them.” Wow, that’s pretty fucking harsh, Doris.

Okay, some of my upbringing wasn’t all that bad. Mother tried to be as overprotective as her parents were, but they held her back and quite often I was tossed out to figure things out on my own. During my school years I’d quite often leave the house on my own to go hang out at my friends houses. When we were in primary school, my friends’ parents used to feed me, give me a bath, and even sometimes let me stay over, they must have figured out what was going on behind closed doors. When I got to secondary school I was able to fend for myself.

I should probably say at this point that I don’t call her mum or mam, that’s reserved for decent parents like those my friends had. The best she’ll get is “Ma” which I begrudgingly write in greetings cards at holiday time, but I digress. Now where was I? 

If I wasn’t out with friends then I was at home in my bedroom or in the play park on the estate. I much preferred to be outside than in, but for reasons that she would never explain, mother would occasionally not let me out or she would ground me. Those were the times I hated the most, you see, this was the late eighties and the early nineties. We only had good cartoons between 3:15pm and 5pm on a weekday or very early on Saturday and Sunday morning. There was no Disney channel or Cartoon Network. We didn’t have computers and phones and the internet. I didn’t have loads of great toys either, as a single parent family we lived on a council estate and didn’t have much money, London’s a pretty expensive place to live! 

I hated being home. It wasn’t just the boredom, it was mother’s boyfriends. Pamela Appleton loved the attention of men and she’d have a different guy all the time. Some of them must have known how crazy she was, when they met me and heard my name and the story behind it, they’d get that look on their face. They wouldn’t say anything negative to mother, though, she was the one they were going to bed with after all. No, it wasn’t her that got their judgement. It was me. Some of the guys didn’t stop at judgement either. I sometimes have nightmares about hiding under the bed from this one guy and his belt, or that one time another guy dragged me down the stairs by my ankle and threw me out the front door because I slammed my bedroom door too hard while they were shagging. 

My only solace through all this was Jamie. At primary school I was made to do an arts and crafts project with this shy little girl with really short hair. When we started working together our collective weird came out and we stayed friends all through school and into adulthood. This girl went a bit quiet through the last years of high school, and she stopped talking to me when we entered the world of work. I went to her house one day to have it out with her and she broke down and told me she’d been trying to ditch everyone from her old life now that she was an adult. She saw it as a fresh start and time to really become who she truly was. The person she truly was wasn’t a girl at all but a boy named Jamie. God I must have screamed at Jamie for over an hour for being so thick. How could he have ever thought I wouldn’t support him through this? We’re still best friends to this day and Jamie has still got my back against all the weird family drama. 

Jamie doesn’t have a conventional job anymore. When he first started getting those testosterone shots, he started documenting it and putting it on YouTube. He stayed relatively unknown for a while until channel 4 asked him to do a docu-series about transgender children who were abandoned by their parents. The whole purpose of the show was to try and get them back together and get the parent to accept the child and stop being a transphobic piece of shit. 

It didn’t work for Jamie’s relationship with his parents, but the show used a couple of short clips from his YouTube channel and the community rushed in to offer support. At the time of my leaving university I think he had about 260k followers.

Jamie is actually the reason I learned who my Dad was. I was taking a break from my latest gruelling sociology essay and invited him over to hang out. He said he had a new box set he wanted to show me because the actors were all absolutely gorgeous, plus it was right up my street because horror and monsters and blood!

A few hours later, we were sitting in my mother’s living room amongst her many, many plants watching a show about two brothers travelling across America to kill all manner of supernatural creatures. In fact that was the name of the show, Supernatural. Jamie had gone to the bathroom and I was looking through the pictures on the dvd cases. 

“Hey Jay, remember when I used that face app thing to make me look like a guy? Don’t you think he looks like me?” When he returned, I slid the box over to Jamie and tapped my finger on the face of an older man wearing a black suit and overcoat. Jamie grabbed the box and squinted at it for a bit while I pulled out my phone and started scrolling through my WhatsApp downloads. 

“Here it is!” I found the picture and showed it to him. The resemblance was uncanny. 

“Oh God, don’t you dare ruin Crowley for me!” He threw a wrapped Malteser from the Celebrations box that we were currently gorging ourselves on.

“Alright, Daddy Issues!” I taunted back, teasing him for his love of older men.

“What’s all the noise?” Mother chose a lovely time to remind me of her existence. 

“Alright Mrs Sheppard, I didn’t know you were home!” I snorted a laugh, Jamie always called her ‘Mrs Sheppard’ as a dig at our family history.

“Jamie, lovely to see you.” Her words were dripping with venom.

“Oh my God!” Jamie startled! “Sheppard! Look at this!” 

Jamie bolted out of his chair with the dvd in hand and launched himself at mother. 

“Don’t you think Fee looks like this guy? And his name is Sheppard too!”

“Jay…” I began to protest, mother could get quite nasty when provoked. 

“Who is that?” Mother was squinting at the small picture on the dvd case. 

“He’s an actor, his name’s Mark Sheppard.”

Mother handed the dvd back and floated out of the room. Jamie looked at me and I used my finger to draw circular motions around my ear while mouthing the word  _ crazy. _

We ended the night after another couple of episodes and Jamie went home. I was making my way to the bathroom to start getting ready for bed, but as I passed my mother's bedroom, I saw her kneeling on the floor while flipping through an old looking trunk next to her. She looked quite sullen and I felt a little sorry for her. 

“Hey Ma. I’m heading to bed. Sorry about Jamie’s teasing earlier, you know what he’s like.”

“Fee come here, I want to show you something.” She spoke normally, if a little quiet. 

I entered the room and sat down next to her. The trunk wasn’t as sturdy as it looked from the outside, it had flimsy, thin walls that were probably made of some kind of plastic and it was well and truly scratched up and battered. Inside there were all manner of trinkets, papers, photos, cassette tapes and records and even a couple of bundles of cloth. I’d never seen this collection before, but it looked like a box of keepsakes.

Mother handed a record to me. It looked cheaply made and there were more than a few creases and stains across the cover. It was white and depicted a man and a woman in 60’s style dress, the woman had a walking stick over her shoulder They looked vaguely familiar, I was almost certain the woman was the model Twiggy. The top left corner simply read ‘Television Personalities’. On the right, scrawled in what looked like ballpoint pen were the words “To Pam, love Empire”. The back of the sleeve had all manner of 60’s style images in a style making them look like a rough collage and text in absolutely no order. I assumed they were the names of songs. Ma pointed at one group of words that read “Music by; Edward; Mark; Daniel;”

“I've never told anyone this, but you’re an adult now and I hope you keep this to yourself. That’s your father, Mark. He was the drummer.”

“Oh.” I felt pretty unaffected by her confession. I didn’t know anything about the band who had created this LP. There were no pictures of the band. I just knew his name was Mark. “So he’s not that one from Jamie’s tv show, is he? Just happens to have the same name.”

“Oh well, I have followed a few things he’s done over the years. Always wondered what things would be like if I told him about you.” Her words trailed off dreamily.

“Ma!” I prompted, slightly impatiently.

“Well, I didn’t want to say in front of Jamie, but yes, it’s the same Mark. He left the band not long after we met and by the time I heard he’d joined another band, well, I already had you so I didn’t say anything. It was a long time later that I heard from a mutual friend that he’d moved to LA to be an actor. I looked him up online a few years ago. He’s got his own family and everything now.”

It was that moment right there that changed the rest of my life. 

  
  
  



End file.
